European Tour Explores Innovation in Storytelling at BMW PGA Championship

Carlo De Marchis

3 years ago

The 2015 BMW PGA Championship in Wentworth brought us four great days of golf, a new surprise winner Byeong-Hun An from Korea and an amazing hole-in-one which granted Chris Wood an innovation icon: the BMW i8.

Lots of fantastic shots and great excitement and think we will be seeing a lot more of Byeong-Hun An in the future. Terrific player.

The BMW i8 was not the only innovative product to be showcased at Wentworth; European Tour was selected by deltatre as one of the first property to explore how sport storytelling can be innovated with SportTeller.

StarSports in India has previously introduced SportTeller to the world of cricket during this year Cricket World Cup, covering every match both in preview and summary mode.

The challenge for the European Tour editorial team, in a week when content creation is already at its max, was to find a way to tell the story of the tournament through numbers but in a visual appealing way.

With seamless transition between one panel and the next one and in-place video auto-play the user experience is a smooth, continuous flow of content following the story script.

European Tour decided to use SportTeller for a daily summary based on the key stats and numbers that would emerge during the day, highlighting the key moments and key duels.

All this had to be ready just as the day finished. With minimal effort it was made possible through the SportTeller back-office. You just need great story tellers who can distil the whole day in a few key elements.

“We are always keen to explore innovative opportunities to grow the engagement with our global fan base and deliver the best possible consumer experience of the European Tour. deltatre’s SportTeller is one such innovation and provided us with an exciting, interactive platform to tell the story of the BMW PGA Championship and showcase our flagship event in an whole new way.” said Roddy Williams, Managing Editor, europeantour.com.

The experience for editors and storytellers is very satisfying. They can finally see their ideas and skills take a new life in a very appealing format.

The format forces editors to really focus on building a great story, no more, no less; emphasising what is needed to bring the passion and emotions of sport events to fans.

The experience for fans is extremely appealing, quick facts direct to the point and emotional videos that users can navigate as they like.

SportTeller is a platform based on cutting edge backend and frontend web technology. It is composed of a series of scenes in sequence, containing a number of templates: general purpose and sport specific. Major sports are already covered and more will be added through the year.